


Outlandish

by Demidea



Category: Warcraft (2016), World of Warcraft
Genre: Definitely more movie than game, I'm not going to be entirely faithful though, M/M, new tags as I expand, the martian au, with bits of canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-13
Updated: 2017-02-12
Packaged: 2018-09-23 23:18:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9686618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Demidea/pseuds/Demidea
Summary: Khadgar is the youngest member of the Expedition Team sent to explore the strange alien world Medivh discovered. So, naturally, Khadgar is only member of the team to be stranded in that strange alien world when their portal explodes. Trapped with limited supplies and a crystal that can only transmit one way, he needs to figure out what happened to destroy the portal, and perhaps he'll find his way back home in the meantime.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is unbeta'd! And also my pet project tribute to The Martian by Andy Weir. I love that book, and the movie that followed, and thought Khadgar would make an excellent Mark Watney. All that time alone with no one to stop him from trying out new experimental magic...
> 
> Yep. I'm not worried at all for his health and safety. He'll be fine.

The first thing Khadgar notices when he wakes up is the cottony feel of his mouth, like he’d fallen asleep with it open after a long, often multi-day, work cycle, or a short night’s drinking. Beyond that, the other sensations file in: ringing ear, aching head, the stabbing pain of brightness he assumes is the sun. He must have passed out in the beer garden at Dalaran, which was stupid of him. Lothar must have talked him into it, except Lothar would’ve woken him up in time to get ready to go through the Portal, he wouldn’t have left Khadgar behind…

He’s hit with the sudden, clear image of Turalyon’s panicked expression as their view of each other refract and shear. The very space between them shreds itself, and the force of collapse hits him so hard he’s unconscious before he knows anything else.

He had already gone through the Portal. They all had, Turalyon, Alleria, Kurdran, Danath, Medivh, they’d already stepped through the Portal from their Command Center in the Morass. Khadgar isn’t a religious man, but he can feel the prayer building in his gut. He opens his eyes, willing them to focus. All he can see is the murky blue-green sky. He was still in Draenor. His only connection to Azeroth is gone.

“Fuck.” His throat is rough-tumbled sandpaper, but he manages to say that outloud.

 

One thing at a time. That’s all Khadgar will allow himself to think about. The next task, and the one after, and the one after. He managed locate the crate with the building reagents for a hold, so shelter wasn’t much of an issue. Kurdran had walked him through activating the built in magic that would do most of the work for him during their training, and he's fairly certain he followed the guidelines. The finished hold looked suitable enough. At least, it looked like every hold he's ever been in. Once that was done, rather than get caught up in the building despair of his situation, he immediately launched into salvaging the supplies.

At first he grabs whatever appears intact. This lasts until a moment of clarity breaks through his focus and he realizes he’s trying to shove a transmission crystal in a pile of piping used to build a forge. Looking around, he realizes he’s gathered mostly spare parts and some odds and ends. There’s no doubt he’d find some use or another out of everything here, but he had to have priorities. Namely, water and food, and the equipment he and Medivh hauled through.

He needed to examine his surroundings, to check the grounds around the Portal to figure out what he could about why it failed. He had a million things to do, and they cycle through his thoughts until his priority list shuffles out of control.

The corner of a blanket catches his eye. The bag it was packed in is scorched but not seriously damaged. The color tips him off, a placid shade of cobalt. He picks up his pack, and lets it slip away as he unfolds the blanket and wraps it around his shoulders. Suddenly he’s aware of the slight chill signalling the end of the day, the ache in his back and shoulders, how raw the skin of  his face feels.

On his first day of training, Lothar peered around the room, then met his gaze. “There are going to be moments in the field where you know you are about to die. In those moments, if you’re not immediately proven right, that means you don’t know everything. And I assure you, you don’t know everything.”

What a strange progression of events it has been, since that day. He went from knowing most things in his field, to knowing almost nothing of his team’s field skills, to knowing most things in field work, to now: knowing nothing of his field. To knowing nothing of his actual circumstance.

To- staring at a light on his transmission crystal that confirmed the transmission back to Command was clear and receiving.

“Oh. Hello.”

And the battery dies.

“God damn it.”

 

Commander Lothar doesn’t claim to be an intellectual. The various explanations they have on his desk have no value to him. The image on the screen, however, means everything. Khadgar, the youngest expedition team member to qualify for the expedition through the portal, the only member unaccounted for when the portal exploded, is alive. Which would be a relief, if he wasn’t alive and well on the wrong side of the Portal.

“That hold wasn’t set up when you were expelled, was it?”

“No, sir.” Turalyon replies. He’s slumped in a meeting chair turned at an angle to compensate for his splinted leg. He’d refused the healers, and would continue to do so under Medivh regained consciousness. “We had a provisional camp set up, with three personal tents and a cookfire tent for meetings and operations, but we hadn’t finished scouting the area as a whole to set up a permanent outpost.”

Lothar continues to stare. The image was moving, but he had the sounds turned off. Khadgar was going through his fourth cycle of returning with retrieved goods for the dozenth time since Lothar was made aware of this recording. The background was faint, he didn’t recover and set up good lighting until the seventh or eighth cycle, but clearly the molded stone of a permanent outpost. “He wasn’t trained in building magic, was he?”

Turalyon smiles at that. “No, but he-”

“-was learning.” Lothar finishes with him, a faint smile formed and gone in the blink of an eye. “He’s alive now, but his transmission eventually cuts and we have no idea if he’ll be able to set it up again. You’re mission captain, you’re in the most qualified position to tell me. Will he be able to survive until we can get the Portal online again?”

The question hangs heavy in the air, and Lothar doesn’t expect an immediate answer. “Until we get the Portal online” in itself was uncharacteristically optimistic. “If they could get the Portal back online” was more accurate. The damage to the many delicate, highly calibrated parts that contained the portal had blown out or were instantly fossilized after a bath in pure magic. Decades worth of expenses and work, gone in the space of seconds.

“I don’t know.” Turalyon says it more to buy himself time to think. “It would depend on if he can drink the water. We’d have to examine what equipment made it back through with us, and which he may have access to, and speculate on the damage they may have suffered by the blast.”

“Any hostiles?”

“No sir, none that we ran into. Though that could change. Medivh had said something about animals instinctively fleeing from the concentration of energy caused by the Portal. So it stands to reason, without the portal it’s only a matter of time before it’s something to worry about.”

“How secure is the hold?”

“I should be identical to the ones we use here. In theory. There’s any number of structural flaws and changes he could have made, intentionally or not.”

“And one of ours here takes a minimum contingent of five men to run within our minimum safety margins.” Lothar takes a deep, deep breath. “But he’s a lot better off than being restricted to just a tent for shelter. What about food? Will he be able to feed himself if he loses the supply rations?”

“As with the water, I really don’t know. Medivh was going to pair up with Alleria to sample the local flora and fauna. For science, of course, but I know there were tertiary plans in the making for experimental jerky.”

“But no data as of the time of the explosion.”

Turalyon’s smile evaporated. “No, sir.”

“So we know he has shelter but we’re not sure the quality. We know he’s scavenged some odds and ends from the supplies, but not how much he can actually use. We don’t know if there are hostile elements, what kind of weather he can expect, or if he can survive once his supplies run out.”

“Not to mention the uncertainty over whether or not he will be able to repair his transmitter, or, even if he manages that, if we can communicate with him.”

“Thanks for the reminder.” Lothar growls, dropping into a chair. He tears his eyes from the screen to look his colleague and friend over again. His expression softens from stretched to the brink of his patience to tired.

“No problem, boss.” Turalyon says, light heartened despite his rigid spine. “But just in case you forget, this is Khadgar we’re talking about.”

“I know.” They sit in relative silence, watching Khadgar drag several items in on a makeshift sled he’s made out of tent material. Lothar sighs. “It’s not your fault.” Turalyon won’t hold his gaze. “So stop acting like it, get yourself fixed up, and report here tomorrow. We have work to do.”

“Yes, sir.”

 

“He’s alive?” Alleria bursts into Lothar’s Command Center. Lothar had been expecting it. It’s been about sixteen minutes since he dismissed Turalyon. At the lieutenant's usual brisk pace, it would take ten minutes to get to the infirmary, compensating for the crutches meant it would take him about 12-14 minutes, and then a few minutes to break the news.

“So far as we know. His transmission ended three hours ago.” Lothar turns to look at her. She’d been the third closest to the portal, fourth, if you consider Khadgar among them. Though she’d been with the healers for nearly five hours, she still had bandages around both arms and around her chest.

“Which means?”

“We can assume he’s alive until his water runs out.”

“And that would be?”

“Purely speculative.”

Irritated, she blows the air out of her eyes. He notes she also has stitches on her temple, and Lothar is familiar enough with them to recognize Turalyon’s work. Medivh’s condition must be serious if they can’t even spare a few minutes for minor bleeding. “What do we need to do?”

“Rest. Recuperate. Regroup.” On the screen, Khadgar takes a deep, shuddering breath, picks up a corner of the now cleared tent-sled, and trudges back off screen.

Alleria gives a short laugh next to him. “You know that’s not happening.”

He wonders how she hasn’t picked up on just how spent his patience is. “Alleria. I know you’re on loan from Quel'Thanas so I can’t technically order you around or be rude, so I’m going to ask you nicely: shut up.” It has the effect he’s seeking, she’s staring at him with her mouth open. He figures he only has a second before her brain reconnects with her mouth and he gets a verbal slap. “None of us are any good to him exhausted or distracted. The absolute best solution would be to fire up the portal right now and yank him back to base, but since that isn’t possible, we have to settle for option two, figure out how to rig another portal to bring him back before he dies of exposure, starvation, or thirst. I can’t do that with incompetent team.”

Alleria is a reasonable woman, so in all truth Lothar didn’t need to say any of this. In other circumstances he might have held himself in check, but today she had suffered through the destruction of a lifetime’s work, the death of team member and coma of another, and now it turns out Khadgar wasn’t dead. Just stranded. The sharp tone must bring her back to that state of mind, though, because her mouth closes into a bitter twist, and she breaks eye contact to stare at the screen. After a long pause, during which Khadgar returns with several blackened lumps that must contain supplies, she speaks again.

“What do you think Llane’s going to say?”

Lothar breaths in deeply.

 

And breathes out. The screen of the Command Center is occupied by King Llane, stoic, and by the rows of colorful books behind him, taking the news in his private study. Lothar waits, arms crossed in front of his chest, for the interrogation to begin.

“We left a man on another world?”

Thankfully, Turalyon and Alleria were restricted to the Infirmary until the Healers could get them sorted out. Danath was here, though, and his stony expression paired with the tic in his jaw told Lothar enough of how he felt on the way the statement was worded. Llane’s image projected on the control room wall, however, is unforgiving.

“Yes, sir. We’ve confirmed Khadgar is still alive.”

“We left _Khadgar_ on another world?”

Danath radiates enough tension that Lothar is afraid he’ll snap. He doesn’t bother turning to check, responding to Llane instead. “Yes, sir.”

“Khadgar. The youngest member of the party. The mage the Kirin Tor didn’t clear and was only allowed through on Medivh’s demand. We _left him_ on a _foreign planet_?”

“Yes.” It’s a measure of his own temper that Lothar manages to grit out a semi-polite response.

On screen, Llane leans heavily on elbow, fingers massaging his temple. “The Council is going to flay us, and as you are on site still, that means I’ll be bearing it for the lot of us.” Danath eases some. “What news of Medivh?”

“He’s still unconscious. The Healers say they’ve done what they can. They’re sure he retains brain function, but can’t be sure when or if he’ll wake up.”

“And he was our portal expert, with Khadgar being the secondary expert.” So any explanation of why the Portal failed was likely to be rudimentary and therefore unsatisfactory to anyone on the ruling council, much less so to Antonidas. “Is there a possibility of establishing contact with Khadgar?”

Lothar glaces at Danath, who was still frowning, but now just looked tired. He took the cue. “Each member of the team had a personal crystal communication set, all attuned to a larger, more powerful set we kept at camp, which in turn was attuned to the crystal kept here in Command. They’re set to automatically sync with one another after a power surge of any sort. The transmission crystal synced, which is how we got the confirmation Khadgar was alive, but the receiving crystal has yet to resync.”

“Which means?”

“There are two possibilities. The crystal may be covered in debris, and is merely blocked but still functional, or the crystal itself is damaged.”

Llane’s frown deepens. “And the transmission crystal, it cut out, did it not?”

“Transmission from another planet requires a lot of energy. He likely just ran out of power.”

“That’s a lot of likely-s and possibilities.”

Lothar cuts in before Danath can reply. “We’ve never worked in certainties, except for what needed to be done.”

Llane sighs. “Danath, thank you for your report. I’m sorry for being tense.”

“No apologies necessary, my lord. I don’t like the situation anymore than you do.”

“Let our next focus be on reducing the number of possibilities and increasing the number of facts.” Llane inclined his head. “If you’ll excuse us, I’d like to speak with Lothar alone.”

“Your majesty.” Danath stands to full attention and salutes, before taking his leave.

Llane waits a few minutes before breaking the silence again. “How are you holding up?”

Lothar’s shoulders draw in tight, his chest constricting as he dreads addressing the issue at hand. “He’s more alive than he was a day ago.”

“Does the crew know about you two?”

He can feel his lips tighten. “We never discussed it. But, I’m fairly certain Turalyon knew.”

“And if Turalyon knows, so does Alleria.”

“Medivh I told myself.”

“Naturally.” Llane hesitates. “Danath?”

“If he doesn’t know, he suspects.”

“You know this is something I should disclose to the Council.”

“They’ll try to remove me.”

“They’ll demand it, yes.”

“That would be messy and counterproductive.”

Llane grits his teeth, his voice dropping from wary to frustrated. “And if it gets out we hid it, they’ll remove all representatives from Stormwind in every matter, including me from the Council itself!”

Lothar stares him down. “Tell them what you must, but don’t expect me to leave this post until he has been retrieved.”

“I don’t want to fight you, Anduin. But I must tell the Council, and if I’m to tell the Council, you’re to tell your crew.” For a moment after, they continue to stare and only stare, until Llane sees the tension won’t break under his will alone, and adds, softly, “They’ll be dedicating their lives and a significant amount of resources to this effort. They deserve to be informed of any potential bias or conflict of interest that might impact their work.”

“I would do everything I could for any one of them.” Lothar replies, bitter.

“I know that. Your team knows that. But, politically speaking, it is an easy enough claim to make. Now, I’m sure you’ve been telling your team this, so it’s my turn. Get some rest, my friend. You look dead on your feet.”

“Give Taria my love.”

“And make her worry more?”

Lothar feels the flicker of a smile. “She’s not usually wrong in those matters.”

“That is little comfort for us all.”

“I suppose it is. Light be with you.”

“Go with honor.”

The screen goes blank, and Lothar allows his shoulders to slump.

**Author's Note:**

> Writing's been slow, lately, and I have at least three drafts of new chapters for other fics, but sometimes the inspiration just doesn't hit as you expect it. I'll update as I go! Thank you for reading!


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